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Last night Rockola played their George Harrison birthday show! I went for the first show (7-9) and it was wonderful, just wonderful. Dan went too, to tech both shows, but we took separate cars so I could go home after the first show and not stay out far too late and mess up my sleep for the next two weeks. We got there nice and early, and I knitted most of Henry’s sock before the show started.

Today I recorded chapter 11 of The Story of the Middle Ages. My audio software, Sound Studio, is driving me nuts. The latest version, 3.5, has a bug which renders the 10-band EQ useless – the program crashes whenever you try to EQ a file. Awesome. I’ve been talking to Tech Support about it for a week, but so far they’re unable to fix it. I’m not the only one, either — a few other people have posted this problem on the Sound Studio forum. This drives me CRAZY. It’s not like I’m asking the program to do something esoteric and unusual — I’m simply trying to use a built-in filter. And it worked just fine in the last version of the program. *GNASHES TEETH* Luckily, I didn’t update the software on my other computer, but have a version there that’s two releases old and missing some useful recording features BUT has a working EQ filter. So I record my audio in the new version, use the old version to EQ it, then finish the editing in the new version. So efficient.

Also vacuumed and mopped the main level of the house. I forgot to mention that I replaced the World’s Most Useless Mop with a new twisty mop from Target which works beautifully. So exciting, isn’t it!

5 Responses to “Rockola, Sound Studio Stupidity, and Mops”

Audacity is free; Sound Studio is $80. I tried Audacity, but I hated the UI. Sound Studio has a beautiful clean OS-Xy UI, and, ordinarily, it works like a charm, is stable, and never gives me a moment’s trouble. I’ll be sure to post when they fix this horrible bug, and then I suggest you download the 30-day demo and give it a try. But never never never upgrade without saving a backup of whatever version you have that’s working!

I have to be honest and don’t really have a need for it since I’ve been using GarageBand for the podcasts and any librivox readings I do. It may be overkill for the librivox readings, but it works for me. On a completely different topic, what recording gear do you use?

I’ve used three different inexpensive USB mics since I started at LibriVox, so if you listen to my older recordings you’ll hear quite a variation in sound quality. For my birthday last year Dan bought me a condenser mic (I think it’s an AKG Perception) and an M-Audio USB interface thingy, so I’ve been using that since last September or so. I think it gives a pretty good sound.